Inside Crossover with Java Chief Architect Bart Rybusinski

Crossover CEO Andy Tryba has credited Bartosz “Bart” Rybusinski as part of the “genius behind the unbelievable results” at RideAustin. Bart, based in Łódź, Poland, has been part of the RideAustin team since the nonprofit ridesharing service launched in June 2016. It was formed as a response to Uber and Lyft shutting down operations in the Austin, Texas metro area in May — leaving many locals without transportation and drivers without jobs.

Bart was hired on as the team’s Java chief architect, the highest level role available through Crossover. His and his team’s job was to ramp up as quickly as possible to fill the void — the initial goal was to develop apps for both drivers and riders that could support providing 100,000 rides within the first 100 days.

So Crossover’s RideAustin team worked around the clock — what Bart calls “[running] a marathon at a sprint pace” — to develop apps in only two short weeks in time for RideAustin’s launch in mid-June. Since then, thanks to Bart and the rest of the dev team’s support, RideAustin has had the technical capability to sustain exponential growth, delivering over 400,000 rides through its apps during the company’s first 150 days.

Bart attributes this success to his team’s skill, dedication, and hard work. He enjoys leading a team of talented engineers from all over the world, working together on product and process design and identifying and implementing improvements for the RideAustin apps.

His biggest challenge has been to make sure RideAustin’s technical capabilities keep up with the organization’s dramatic growth. Bart has had to determine the best way to scale, releasing new features and upgrades for a system that needs to sustain a high load 24/7. Additionally, he and his team must make live deployments while the system is operating — a system that thousands of users are relying on at any given time. Bart approached this challenge as an opportunity to learn and strengthen his skills.

“When I joined Ride Austin, I learned how much I don’t know,” Bart said. “Every day I solve high-complexity problems, explore technologies I never knew existed, and work [with] an extremely skilled software dev team.”

Bart’s team has tackled the challenge of creating software that tests itself, without depending on backward compatibility or digression testing. This approach automates as many processes as possible, leaving developers free to focus on new features and deployments for the apps.

The team relies on a variety of cloud-based services and products like Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Elasticsearch, among many others. Bart says that working with a diverse technology stack is one of his favorite parts of the job, but he also values the ability to combine his passion for development with the opportunity to build his technical leadership skills.

Based on his team’s success in scaling RideAustin’s technology to support its growing user base, Bart is confident that they will be able to continue to grow, even expanding RideAustin’s nonprofit ridesharing model into other cities.

From taking on exciting, fast-moving projects to working with full stack and mobile technologies, Bart thrives on the creativity and flexibility that come with working in a startup environment. He also has the satisfaction of being part of an organization that’s constantly progressing toward bigger and better things — just like his career.